As any discerning project manager or small business owner knows, calculating project budgets correctly is essential to ensure long-term profitability. Accurate job costing can mean the difference between a project making the company money, and costing your business more time, money, and stress than you anticipated.
That’s why project time tracking is so important. Here’s why project time management is an essential tool for businesses.
As the saying goes, time is money. And this is never more apparent than when a project overruns, causing your team to work on tasks for longer than expected. Every additional day overrun is another day of lost income for the business that could’ve been billed to profitable projects or clients. This is one reason why effective time management is so important.
Therefore, using time tracking software, your business can avoid overspending to manage projects successfully and track time down to the second.
For some small businesses, project forecasting is extremely difficult and there's often an element of guesswork involved. If you overestimate you might lose out on the work to another organization that quoted lower, but if you underestimate you might risk losing money overall. With the right time tracking app, managers and business owners have access to data that can help them forecast for projects with a much higher accuracy for estimates.
Time data allows you to see how everyone on your team has spent their time for higher accuracy of project forecasting. Analyze data based on team members, and time spent on projects, clients, specific tasks, and individual employees to gain a truly holistic understanding of the everyday running of your business.
Not only does this help you improve efficiencies on existing projects, but you’ll be able to take these learnings and apply them to future bids, jobs, and forecasts to reap the rewards.
Accurate time tracking data is valuable for internal analysis, but it’s also a valuable asset when it comes to keeping your customers happy. Clients like to know what they’re getting for their money. Being able to show them timesheet data as evidence of how hard your team has been working on their projects is good for your business as well as theirs.
Don’t forget that many of your clients will have their own boss to report back to. Any data or reports they can use to prove your business is a good investment will help you stay in their good books. If you can show transparency and honesty when dealing with your customers and tracking your time, you’ll build positive working relationships for many years to come.
Whatever industry you work in, with project time tracking, you’ll find the increased accountability means your team members’ efficiency improves, so they get more done in less time. The result? More motivated teams, more time to spend on other projects, more profit for your business, and more money in the bank at the end of every month.
Tracking time using automatic software also frees up more time for managers and team leaders, as they no longer need to spend hours drawing up schedules, rotas, or forecasts for their teams. Instead, they can spend their time on more profitable work and offer additional support to their team when it’s needed.
Your team wants to do a good job and deliver their best work, but their top priority isn’t always keeping track of the project budget while doing so. A time tracking tool gives project managers increased monitoring abilities, so they can see an overview of every project at the click of a button. If it looks like a project is at risk of running over its allocated budget, they can step in and adjust their team’s time accordingly to prevent this.
Project management tracking software ensures that every team member stays within their limits on their projects – even if they work overtime – preventing overspending and ensuring that projects are finished on time and within budget.
Whether you’re a small business owner looking to improve internal processes or a project manager within a large enterprise concerned about the metrics of a specific project, time management software can help. QuickBooks Time software allows you to automate internal processes like reporting, invoicing and pay stubs, freeing up time for managers to spend elsewhere.
A time tracker also allows you to delve down into the granular details of how time is spent across projects, with data broken down into simple visualizations that help you understand your objectives better and spot areas where efficiencies can be made and productivity improved.
Paying your employees doesn’t have to be a hassle. A time tracking solution like software can easily see how many hours they’ve worked, including overtime, making pay stubs a breeze. In fact, with QuickBooks Time and QuickBooks Online accounting software, it’s possible to pair the two applications to automate pay stubs completely.
Millions of businesses turn to QuickBooks to help them keep track of their project spending and estimates, timesheets, productivity, resources, and more. Using QuickBooks Time, you can easily track employees time, tasks, and projects to ensure the project budget is where it needs to be. Start tracking today with a free trial.
Call Sales: 1-888-829-8589
